Back in the saddle

Finally got the all clear and despite some minor bruising and tenderness, after over two months, I'm back in the water again. Awesome!.

To celebrate we invaded Lighthouse Point and had some of the best conditions I've ever seen there. Someone knew I was coming......31C at the surface, 27C in the water, 30+ metre viz and no current, you couldn't ask for any better.

Given that this is one of my favourite sites for macro, it was time to got to work, especially as we'd had reports of some flabellina engeli in the vicinity. The hunt was on!

"Wave your antennae in the are like you just don't care!"

As always here, slow and steady wins the race and it pays to scour the hardpan in the first 6 metres as you never know what your going to find. Gobies and blennies were out in force today and it would have been rude not to get some shots of them.

A nice saddled blenny in amongst the coral

As always it wouldn't be a dive here without our faithful snapper Spot following closely by our side, sometimes a little too closely as he would scare off potential subjects or just block the lens. I think a little more house training is in order........

Spot hogs the camera as usual. There was actually a hammerhead behind him. No, honest!

As always when you go diving, you need to go down with a specific plan in mind, e.g. today's mission was macro but when there's so many nice things to shoot you do get side tracked, even if you know you have the wrong lens on for the shot, you know you still have to chance it. You might just get lucky......

There were more than enough morays out and about today and there was a particularly nice little juvenile goldentail that was just loved watching itself in the lens port.

"Look deep into the fiery lidless eye of Sauron!"

There were also some monstrous spiny lobsters out on the reef for a scuttle as well as some channel crabs of unusual size (as opposed to R.O.U.S. And if you never watched the Princess Bride, then shame on you!)

"Hey, I'm scuttling here, I'm scuttling!!!

We gave the dive site a thorough scouring but failed to turn up any nudis on this particular visit, but there's plenty more dives ahead. So it was back to shooting some familiar faces in the hopes of some nudis next week.....maybe.

Peek-a-boo....